The book I’m about to read, Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult, is about a family with a disabled child.

I’m about to curl up with my nook and a giant mug of tea, and see what I can do about ripping this book to shreds.

Hope you enjoy it!

Nota Bene: I really appreciate everyone who is educating me on OI and what I’ve gotten wrong. If you want to read a review of the book from an OI perspective, you should go here: http://lisybabe.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/spoiler-warning-handle-with-care-by.html

I’m definitely learning a lot from those of you who’ve tweeted at me to tell me more about OI than this book ever will, and I’d also just like to say that in doing this liveblog, my goal was to expose some of the severely problematic tropes writers use to tell stories about disability. I apologize in advance if I am wrong, and will continue to learn as much as I can.

You know… I realize that Charlotte believes her child will be incapable of things, but the phrase “I read on the internet about a girl with Type III who….” sounds like Charlotte buys into the sob stories way too easily

“It’s a funny thing, though” I said, my voice knotting around a rope of tears. “In order for the lawyer to help us, we have to play a game.I have to say things I don’t really mean. Things that might hurt you if you heard them and didn’t know I was really just acting.”

“She didn’t steal a THING, like a television or a bracelet. She just didn’t tell me something that she should have. Something very important.”
You looked down at your lap.
“It was something about me, wasn’t it?”

“My best friend was suing me for medical malpractice. For wrongful birth. For not telling her earlier about your disease, so that she would have had the chance to abort the child she’d begged me to help her conceive.”

“I want someone who cares beyond the point of professional responsibility, I want someone who wants me to have a baby as much as I want to.” – Charlotte to Piper about wanting to conceive. Much like she handles her child, so she handles her life. it’s all about Charlotte.

“You didn’t answer your phone”
“My battery died”
“You could have called from the hospital.”
“You can’t actually be angry with me, Sean. I’ve been a LITTLE busy”
“Don’t you think I deserve to know if my daughter gets hurt?”

“We wouldn’t be swimming for a while – out of solidarity for you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast.” Except that he just said in the previous sentence that he snuck a dip in the pool.

“She was about your age, and held onto her mothers hand. She wore a pink tutu and mud boots with frog faces on them. Her head was completely bald. You did the one thing you hated most when it happened to you: You stared.”

BECAUSE SHE’S A KID. ALSO, YOU’D THINK SHE’D RUN INTO CANCER KIDS BEFORE.

Yeah, this is really fucking shitty. It makes me want to stab one of these teachers for not being kind to the CHILD and not forcing her out of school. You’d think they’d HAVE A CONVERSATION before inflicting this.

“Kelsey had her birhday party last weekend – she saved a goody bag for Willow. We would have invited her but, well, it was at the Gymnastics Hut, and I figured she might feel left out.”
Charlotte’s response thought: As opposed to not being invited?

And the first sentences of this chapter are yet another litany of the breaks that Willow has lived through. Charlotte is real obsessed with the breaks, and not so thoughtful about her child’s fucking emotions.

Yep. Daughter #1 is telling dad NOT TO LOOK while she pees (exploitative creepiness again.) And Daughter #2 is watching food burn in the kitchen and is using his poker chips for a school project involving a hot glue gun.

“It was probable that, by the time tis lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing – just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption.”

Um. I think there’s a difference here. Your parents chose to give you up and give you a better life. Willows mother is saying on court record that she wouldn’t have HAD Willow.

“Sean was the risk taker when it came to you. Then again, he wasn’t the one who was home most often when you had a break. But he’d spent years convicing me that a few casts were a small price to pay for a real life ; maybe now I could convince him that two silly words like ‘wrongful birth’ meant nothing when compared to the future they might secure for you.”

“We thought it would be better to discuss this without Willow in the room.”
Says the lawyer.
No Shit, if this is about the wrongful birth case, I wouldn’t want to hear someone telling my parents they could get money if they told people they’d have never let me be born either.

And another description of what it’s like to pee in a spica cast. On the one hand, this depicts what it’s probably like to deal with spica casts. On the other, we already got one description and this is trending towards exploitative sick lit.

“I would listen to people complain about their kids being impolite or surly or even getting into trouble with the law, and I’d be jealous. When those kids turned eighteen, they’d be on their own, making their own mistakes and being held accountable.”

So, you don’t intend to help her figure out how to function outside your maternal bubble?

“Sometimes when I looked at you, I didn’t see the compromised twist of your bones or the short stature that came part and parcel with your illness. Instead I remembered your mother crying when she told me that she had failed to get pregnant yet another month.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t see the disability but just the person ALL of the time?

So, the description of a Spica Cast is pretty horrific. But what bothers me about it is how very pornographic it feels. and she’s writing about a CHILD. “but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.”

A narrative question: How come Amelia is all introspective? Isn’t she supposed to be.. 9 or somethng? “Ah see, there’s something else that I’m jealous about” does not sound like the inner thoughts of a 9 year old.

So. The surgeon didn’t prep the OR nurses on how to hold a baby with OI? The doctor does that while the nurse is holding the baby? This is ENTIRELY so the reader gets to see the nurse BREAK THE BABY’S BONES.

Mom is terrified to give birth to her child (it has not yet been revealed by the narrator that the baby has osteogenesis imperfecta, but I’m clueing you in because ALL THE METAPHOR) because the baby is safer inside of her than outside of her